This project will retell the global history of technology from ancient times to the present through our changing encounters with objects. It begins in early twenty-first-century Mesopotamia and ends with early twenty-first-century Genomics. The book's narrators are ten individual historical artifacts. The life stories they tell are true, and in that sense this is a work of non-fiction, based on intensive research I have conducted in archives, libraries, and museums. That said, these accounts are auto-biographies, and material objects like guns and bicycles are not usually thought capable of having subjective experiences, let alone writing about them. In that sense, this book can also be considered a work of historical fiction. Odd as this approach may seem, this kind of "it-narrative" was actually a popular genre in the Anglophone literature of the late eighteenth century, when readers avidly read accounts that purported to be by various objects—a hackney coach, a guinea coin, or an atom—that offered a serialized account of their adventures as they circulated through the new economy of the Consumer Revolution. We are now living through a technological revolution as disconcerting as the first, and the time has come for things to speak out again.

This image of Marie Curie's bicycle (along with Marie, Pierre, and Pierre's bicycle) shows the four of them before they headed off for their honeymoon in 1895.
Project
(2018)